


filling the spaces thin

by refuted



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, in which Root and Shaw have totally been boning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 13:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3611547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/refuted/pseuds/refuted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, Sameen Shaw fixed people before she broke them. </p><p>(Alternatively: Shaw comes home to find Root passed out on her bed with a fever.) </p><p>Takes place in some vacuum of time before 4.11.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In dire need of some fluff after 4.18.

Sameen Shaw gets sick twice in her life.

Once, when she’s seven. Her parents take her to the hospital when they hear whimpers from her room, find sweat soaking her bedsheets and a fever that refuses to break. They keep her overnight.

She never misses another day of school after that. (One. She stays home, in bed with her mother, with the phone disconnected, but nobody counts it.)

Years later, an intern checks in for rounds with strep. Shaw notices first, but it’s too late. He sends the rest of her class and three nurses home and she considers switching his penicillin with laxatives for the trouble.

Shaw gets shot. Stabbed and poisoned and _killed_ but she doesn’t do sick.

 

-

 

Shaw kicks off her heels the moment she’s through the door to her complex. She walks the several flights up barefoot and tosses the pair of knock-offs onto her apartment floor, closes her eyes and breathes out deeply, until her ribs ache and her feet stop pulsing.

It’s been a long day and an even longer, numberless week, which has left her with hours upon hours inside the garishly bright prison that is her make-up counter and – she isn’t alone.

Root, asleep on her bed. She shuffles in her spot, huddled on top of Shaw’s bedsheets, nose pressing into her pillow.

 

 

(The last time Root broke in went like this:

Shaw pads in well past midnight, smelling of burnt rubber and gunpowder, way beyond in need of a shower and a cold beer.

The lights are on.

She greets Root like normal (the barrel of her USP Compact, a dry huff) and almost decides to make some snarky comment about giving her a key, but what would that imply – it’s too late in the evening to tiptoe around. Maybe another time, when she has a better handle of what it is she’s trying not to tiptoe. She has a guess, swallows it down, but it leaves a dry taste in her mouth.

Root is perched on the kitchen counter, poking into a box of Chinese. Her hair, a little longer now, a different shade, another one of her identities seeping in, soaks through one of Shaw’s tanks. It’s just a little too small, hugs her in all the right places.  

She waves her fingers in hello.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Root says between bites of chow fun. “Too much, at least. Had a little trouble running an errand, didn’t feel like getting a change of clothes.”

She gestures to an identical box beside her, steam piping up through the open folds.

Shaw moves forward, stepping into the v made by Root’s legs. It’s been a while, she thinks, almost says it out loud but Root watches her like she’s thinking the same. She sets the box down and brings her hand up to press at Shaw’s shoulders, slipping her fingers underneath the fabric of her blouse. Shaw takes a moment, takes her in.

“Not really your style,” Shaw murmurs, pulling at the tank, fingers brushing at the soft skin underneath. She traces crescents around Root’s waist with her thumb before she looks up. “You’re stretching it out.”

Root smiles, a soft turn of mouth that she loves but will never admit – dripping with mirth and challenge and, “Should I take it off?”

Shaw does it for her.)

 

 

She takes a moment to marvel, just a little, before realizing she should be annoyed that Root’s encroaching on her own private space. (Maybe, she muses, she’s been doing it all along. Her modus operandi. Always pressing at the boundaries, slipping in through her own carefully crafted barriers.)

She’s distracted, again, when brows furrow and Root twitches in the thick of dreams. She looks beautiful in sleep, maybe a little pale. Shaw wonders what she sees. If the Machine can still reach her like this.

It’s when she notices the sweat along her forehead, despite the 40 degree weather seeping in through a draft.

She gently presses the back of her hand to Root’s neck.

 

-

 

The corner drug store has a disconnected camera, an open back door, and a technician asleep at his desk and Shaw almost wants to glance at the traffic cam across the street.

“Didn’t really need the help, but thanks,” she mutters, to no one.

 

-

 

It’s been a decade since she traded scalpel for hammer, but there are things she doesn’t forget.

Shaw rarely forgets anything but this, this is clockwork. A little rusty but all the pieces are there and it’s like she’s back in residency, dreaming in sutures and stitches.

Once upon a time, Sameen Shaw fixed people before she broke them. (She knows. Beyond any doubt, she knows she would have perfected her technique. Would have gotten bored.)

“Sorry to bother you like this,” Root says from her perch on the bed, watching as Shaw fixes a cocktail of something definitely unpleasant. She frowns at the slush, before flicking her eyes up. “I was hoping that this visit would have involved a little more…touching.”

Shaw huffs (doesn’t disagree).

 

-

 

She doesn’t own a couch.

Or any sort of furniture really, save the bed, the fridge, Gen’s medal. It’s never been a problem because Shaw’s only needed the place to sleep and eat. Store weapons.

Except her place to sleep is occupied by a woman who has infected her entire bed.

“I can take the floor.”

Root frowns. “Let me check in somewhere close. I’ll be fine in the morning, I can see you then.”

“Root.”

“I’m not making you sleep on the floor.”

She sighs. “Take the damn bed. I’ve had worse.”

When Root tries to protest, she steps forward, silences her with a hand pressing softly at her neck. “Fever’s breaking,” she murmurs, fingers skimming along her jaw, under her chin. She pulls up gently, meets her eyes and her face goes soft. “Make it up to me when you’re better.”

 

-

 

“102.”

“Check again.”

“Sameen—

“ _Check. Again._ ”

Shaw sits at the edge of her bed. She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and glares at Root with all the energy she has – which, it turns out, isn’t much.

Root looks at her for a moment, then at the thermometer between her fingers: (for the third time) 102.2 °F.

Winter in New York, crisp and biting, and the back of Root’s hand is damp with a thin sheen of sweat when Shaw swipes it away from her forehead. 

She sighs, and hands it back. “Sweetie, I got you sick,” she tries, to which Shaw growls.

“This isn’t the greatest way of thanking you for yesterday, huh.”

“Root.”

She smiles, soft, sheepish, light in her eyes and it’s almost a consolation, getting to see her so rueful.  

 “Look at it this way,” she says, coming around the bed, slipping underneath the sheets. “I’m immune now, right?”

Shaw glares.

Root leans up, kisses her cheek. “Then I can spoon you.”

“Fuck off.”

 

 

(She lets her, eventually.

They fall asleep flushed, no spot where they aren’t touching.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Root sits along the edge of Shaw’s bed, turning the possible consequences of taking the liberty around in her mind. 
> 
> She shouldn’t be there, probably.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow never let me write not one-shots, I'll never get them done. Short and sweet-ish. (Otherwise I'd have let it sit untouched for another month.)

* * *

 

 

She is Samantha Groves for 4,000 odd days.

It is the second longest life she has had, the first, and the only one she mourns.

The name had only felt right when it came from Hanna, a soft and satisfying lilt around every syllable that no one could ever say in the same way. Harold insists on calling her Ms. Groves like it’s supposed to mean something, but the name tastes so foreign in her mouth; he could call her Ms. Turing and it would feel just the same.  

She has been Root for longer, much longer than she can claim ownership of anyone else. This skin is hers, remains when she sheds the thousand identities the Machine devises – even before; before Finch, before any trace of Her existence, she has always been Root.

 

Now her life goes like this:

Put-on accents, dyed hair, playing nice with Samaritan assets until she isn’t. Empty hotel rooms that are all the same, down to the waiting room paintings, the clinical charm.  The perpetual smell of gunpowder underneath her fingernails and a quiet hum in her ear that she knows is there to placate more than anything else. It is the smallest, safest reminder that she isn’t alone and even then, she falls asleep anxious and empty.  

It used to exhilarate her. A thrill greater than making it to Oregon over and over again without a single scratch, slipping so easily into someone else, slipping herself in and out of someone’s life felt as close to a purpose as she was ever going to get.

She’s mostly just tired now.

But when she interrogates Samaritan operative #19, she is all Root.

She feels the most like herself when she’s hunting.

(Makes her feel less hunted.)

It seeps into other moments. When she gets to return to New York, gets to meet a fiery glare with a toothy smile – and nothing is put-on about this – hears her name in a tone that most could call cross, but she would call charming, that’s when she most feels like herself now, too.

 

She gets a name for her new blonde friend, an uninspired threat, a semi-solid next step.

A cold.

 

Winter doesn’t help the state of her. It slaps at her cheeks and digs under layers of wool and cotton, seeps into her skin and pulls it taut and sensitive.

When she ducks into a cab she’s blinking through watery eyes, can barely hear Her through the headache.  

“Where to?”

Root is a silent for another moment and She repeats:

a familiar address.

 

Root sits along the edge of Shaw’s bed, turning the possible consequences of taking the liberty around in her mind.

She shouldn’t be there, probably.

Root charms, adds lip to everything she says because she’s good at it. Her best weapon has always been the ability to disarm. Samantha Groves grew up small and delicate and learned that she wouldn’t always need physical strength when she could just poison the honey.

(Later, much later, Root would grow to accept the help of a taser.)

It starts the same with Sameen Shaw, all brusque determination and no nonsense fury and a look in her eyes that Root always recognizes as a challenge.

Between an iron and a virus, she crosses a line and it feels natural, like suddenly realizing she’s learned the steps to a dance. (She suspects that Shaw has too.)

Still.

Shaw might just kill her for breaking a boundary.

 

Her hand is cold as it glides from Root’s forehead to her shoulder and it’s gone; the absence leaves a shiver that starts at the base of her spine and travels up her neck when Shaw moves to take the thermometer from under her tongue.

“Sit up,” she says, and the sound is softer than Root expects. “You have a slight fever.”

Root hums, closing her eyes as Shaw presses her fingers against her neck, softer than she is entirely used to and it leaves her feeling off-balanced in front of a Shaw she doesn’t quite recognize.

“You’re saying I’m hot?”

 

Car alarms and sirens and footsteps that crack into the ceilings and Root wakes to the smell of batter and butter.

A plated stack of pancakes sits unceremoniously on the counter.

She ruffles through the kitchen for a fork and syrup and situates herself at the foot of Shaw’s bed, watching silently as she cleans her gun.

This is a routine she recognizes.

(The last time:

Bear sits beside her on the bed, his head on his paws as she idly runs her fingers along his fur and Shaw ignores them both.

Root makes an effort not to sound so bored, but it dies quickly and she takes to rummaging through the rest of the apartment. Shaw makes that face she does when she’s a little bit sick of everyone around her and it would worry Root if she didn’t find it so endearing.

Bear hops off the bed and the spot is soon filled.)

Eventually, Shaw sets the weapon down.

She walks over to Root and the hand at her forehead, what looks suspiciously like concern flicker in her gaze makes her think of who she must have been 10, 15 years ago. Brilliant and bored, Root wonders if Shaw would have been so tender to a patient.

“Kind of satisfying,” Shaw murmurs, to which Root’s eyes drift up. “Super computer helps you dodge bullets, can’t stop a cold.”

Root makes a noise that could be a laugh; she’s forgotten the sound.

Shaw tugs at her blouse, hovers over her most recent wound. “Can’t always stop the bullets, either,” she says, before taking the plate and walking over to the kitchen.

The kitchen clatters with silver and china. Shaw returns minutes later with a glass of not-juice.

Root frowns, suddenly unhappy with the regained ability to taste.

Her mother’s recipe, Shaw tells her and Root isn’t sure if she should find solace in the admission, or suspicion that really Shaw just wants to see her suffer a little. 

“Drink up.”

 


End file.
